was imprudent enough to make himself the
mouth-piece of their remonstrance, which, it is needless to add, was
unsuccessful. Meantime his own day of reckoning had arrived.

As already observed, the advent of Alva at the head of a foreign army was
the natural consequence of all which had gone before. The delusion of the
royal visit was still maintained, and the affectation of a possible
clemency still displayed, while the monarch sat quietly in his cabinet
without a remote intention of leaving Spain, and while the messengers of
his accumulated and long-concealed wrath were already descending upon
their prey. It was the deliberate intention of Philip, when the Duke was
despatched to the Netherlands, that all the leaders of the
anti-inquisition party, and all who had, at any time or in any way,
implicated themselves in opposition to the government, or in censure of
its proceedings, should be put to death. It was determined that the
provinces should be subjugated to the absolute domination of the council
of Spain, a small body of foreigners sitting at the other end of Europe,
a junta in which Netherlanders were to have no voice and exercise no
influence. The despotic government of the Spanish and Italian possessions
was to be extended to these Flemish territories, which were thus to be
converted into the helpless dependencies of a foreign and an absolute
crown. There was to be a re-organization of the inquisition, upon the
same footing claimed for it before the outbreak of the troubles, together
with a re-enactment and vigorous enforcement of the famous edicts against
heresy.

Such was the scheme recommended by Granvelle and Espinosa, and to be
executed by Alva. As part and parcel of this plan, it was also arranged
at secret meetings at the house of Espinosa, before the departure of the
Duke, that all the seigniors against whom the Duchess Margaret had made
so many complaints, especially the Prince of Orange, with the Counts
Egmont, Horn, and Hoogstraaten, should be immediately arrested and
brought to chastisement. The Marquis Berghen and the Baron Montigny,
being already in Spain, could be dealt with at pleasure. It was also
decided that the gentlemen implicated in the confederacy or compromise,
should at once be proceeded against for high treason, without any regard
to the promise of pardon granted by the Duchess.

The general features of the great project having been thus mapped out, a
few indispensable preliminaries we